Over a Cuppa

Tears were pricking at the back of my eyes. I was gripping the car’s steering wheel so tightly that it left indentations on my fingers. Waves of panic were threatening to crash dump over my head and force any remaining calmness into the sand. I was a single mum with...

"You know you don't have to do this mum," said my youngest daughter with her arms around me. "I know .... I want to do this for you," I said with a sad, half-smile as I turned away to begin my long practiced routine. Turn on the iron. Fill it with water. Turn the dial...

This week I have been sick. Not the kind of "sick" snarled by a teenager wearing trousers that show more of their undies than a Victoria's Secret model, but the curled up in a ball and quietly rocking in a ball of misery sick. I mean, who gets the flu in November? It...

Congratulations! Today you graduate from High School. Never again the tree-green uniforms, the piercing bells, the racing helter-skelter to catch the next class. Your life is now different ... the same but very different from everything you have ever known. So I...

Remember High School? Where the scent of Clearasil and BO mingled with raging Testosterone and Oestrogen to create a terrifying cocktail of angst. Remember High School? Where mean girls roamed the corridor - scything down swathes of confidence with a single curl of...

Today is the first Father's Day that I haven't spent hours sifting through cards to find the perfect blend of humour and love. The few pithy sentences that tried inadequately to compress a lifetime of memories and feelings into mere words ... and always failed...

Up until this week, my house had holes punched in the ceiling. To be more exact, there were four squarish holes carefully scattered like stars in the night sky across my ceiling ... except they didn't twinkle and they let the dust into the lounge room and kitchen. And...

Patience is not my strong suit. Let's be more specific. When you look up the word "patience" in a dictionary - in the antonym section (the opposite of the word - if it has been a while since you finished school), you will find my name and my 8x10 signed portrait. I am...

A few weeks back we looked at some research around mindsets - how success depends on whether you believe you can only achieve something if you were a "natural" at it, or if you believe that skill is something you can learn. Last week I put this research to the...

The exhausted mother, glassily patting the back of her baby who has filled her ears with pained sobs from dusk to dawn. The frail old man, carefully folding his lottery ticket into his threadbare wallet as he heads home on the bus to dry crackers for tea. The...

Early this year, over one of our many coffee chats, I asked my father to tell me his top 5 life highlights and what made them stand out. He gave me a strange look and admitted he had never really thought of that before. He had lived a full life, but stopping and...

"He is dead - which is why he can't come to the phone and talk to you. D-E-A-D, deceased, no longer living". I exclaimed forcefully in the phone to the call centre operator. All I was trying to do was cancel dad's TPG internet - and somehow I had morphed into a bad...